Edit: At the begin of the quarterfinals, the above poll has been added. Please take your pick.

1. What is this?

This is, hopefully, a bag full of fun for everyone involved. Going a bit more into detail, it's a competition. Wagic players submit decks that they have built, and the Wagic AI will then play tournament matches between these decks. The deck that wins the tournament earns (besides tons of prestige) guaranteed inclusion into the next release of Wagic.

The devs may also vote on an "Originality Award" for decks with interesting new ideas or flavor, the winner of which will also be included in the next release of Wagic. Other participating decks may be included as well.

2. Sounds fun - what do I need to participate?

To participate, you have to submit one or more decks for the competition. The decks will have to follow some rules:

- The format is Vintage for now (but only with the cards officially supported by Wagic). In the future we will alternate between different formats, once we get format enforcement implemented in Wagic. But for this first competition, we'll start with Vintage. If you're not sure how to construct a Vintage deck, then this page will get you started. A list of all cards officially supported by Wagic 0.9.1 can be found here.

- Submitted decks must be new, i.e. not already included in Wagic or posted on the forums. Getting inspiration from other sources is perfectly okay, as long as it's new for *Wagic*.

- Submitted decks must be substantially different (no more than 50% of non-land cards identical) to the decks already included. Submitting Elfball with one forest substituted by a Savannah will *not* win you the tournament.

- Decks are submitted via PM to my forum account. You can specify a pseudonym if you don't want everyone to know that the deck was submitted by you.

- There is no limit on submissions per person, for the time being. If people think they can produce more than one competitive and interesting deck in the given time frame, more power to them. Let's see how it works - if it causes problems, we can always introduce a limit for the next competition.

- Submitters agree to have their deck included in Wagic. The champion will automatically be included. Further decks may be included as well depending on performance and originality. The devs may elect a deck for an Originality Award - this is to encourage submitters to leave the well-trodden paths and try new things.

- Tournament fixtures will depend on total number of submissions. If there are at least 8 submissions, we'll have a group phase (e.g. 2 groups with 4 decks), so that each deck can present itself in 3 games at minimum, followed by knockout stages )so that we have the suspense of a real final). If I find the time, I may write a match report for the final or semi-finals.

- Matches will be played on the most recent SVN version, which has some important fixes (fixed blocking algorithm, Hypnotic Specter works, etc.)

felgrand89 wrote:By Vintage does that mean that I cant use cards that I created?

If we allowed people to submit decks with self-created cards, then it would take five minutes until the following deck shows up:

Deck Name: UTTER PWNAGE!
Cards: 60x "You win". "You win" is an Instant with 0 casting cost that does 2 billion damage to target opponent. It also has a special rule like "Relentless Rats", which allows you to have any number of "You win" cards in your deck.

I think making such a deck legal would be a bad idea for a tournament.

For this tournament, decks should be Vintage legal (follow the link in the first post for an explanation of the details) and consist only of cards present in the official download of Wagic 0.9.1 (there's another link in the first post that leads to a list of all such cards). We will use different formats in future tournaments, possibly including user-contributed sets in specific tournaments - but for this tournament, it's Vintage.

Status update: I've received 9 decks so far, and at least two more participants are currently working on their decks, so we'll get a nice number of contestants.

I glance over every deck when I receive it (one turned out to be too similar to an already existing deck, but this has already been fixed), but haven't looked closely yet (especially not at the decks that are submitted in numbers-only format). Once I do this, I'll write PMs to the submitters in which I acknowledge that the deck will participate (or mention problems / suggest solutions if it doesn't meet the criteria).